Citizens’ Intelligence Network

Jason Liszkiewicz from re-configure.org tells us that “we are the most advanced technology” and that societies are “supercomputers”. He suggests the public needs a “system of world simulation” in which participants can earn “social currency credits” from their mobile devices by engaging in large-scale problem solving and global brainstorming. A form of virtual reality could begin to influence reality, as individuals “collaborate, create, and reinvent” their communities.

Liszkiewicz imagines citizens would provide their skillfulness, resources, and curiosity to organize in an “intelligence network” that could “provoke community developments” and close gaps in awareness. With mobile technology, the system would harness user experiences and organize their collective intelligence as they share their questions and ideas as they roam. Social credits could be earned through “creative democracy projects” involving “creative multi-media projects” that would be exchanged and added upon.

In his paper Reconfiguring Intelligence Liszkiewicz declares that “simply governing citizens will not generate intelligence nor will indoctrination through schooling and media generate intelligence.” He suggest that investigations must be provoked to decrease the “tendency for minds to follow diluted and distorted programming.

At the time of it’s writing in 2007, he saw no more advanced alternative than “networking networks” both offline and online into earth simulators in which participants live out “what if?” scenarios. The purpose would be to “accelerate learning” while providing massive feedback concerning their region of society and the overall “state of the planet”. Citizens would receive “massive feedback” concerning the challenges they are combating, such as “excessive secrecy, nuclear fears, poverty, disease, basic needs unmet, billions (possibly trillions) of government money unaccounted for, and general direction without foresight and oversight in the public interest.”

In conclusion, he hopes that such a scenario “will develop its relevant overlaps” and converge into something akin to what Robert Steele from Open Source Intelligence describes:

“Over time we will create the multi-national, multi-agency, multi-disciplinary, multi-domain information sharing (M4IS) network that is needed to achieve strategic outcomes in the near, mid, and long terms. It is Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and coalition information sharing, not secret intelligence, that is the driver of strategic outcomes in the 21st Century.”